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32 SEO Tactics to Avoid in 2011

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

With all the excitement and planning that comes along with a New Year, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with newfangled ideas. You probably have a long list of SEO tactics in the pipeline for 2011. Finding the resources, whether time or money, is the real trick.

The point of this post is to minimize your to-do list by covering 32 SEO tactics that you shouldn't focus on. If any of these buggers have made it onto your 2011 task list or are still lingering in the queue from years past, go ahead and cross 'em off. They won't help you reach your goals and some of them can even hinder your progress.

If you are still looking for things to do, check out these New Years post for ideas.

Alrighty then, lets get on with the list of things for you to take off your list.

32 SEO Tactics to Avoid in 2011

Hiding Stuff On-Page There are a hundred ways to hide keywords and links from your users' view and still have them reside behind the scenes on a web page for the search engines to crawl. Some of these methods are smarter than others, but the collective mind of Google's web spam team is smarter than all of them. From just plain silly to downright sneaky, numbers 1-5 in this list of SEO tactics to avoid, we cover off some of the most well known methods for hiding copy and links. At best, you could experience a small, temporary boost from some of these tactics. At worst, you'll land yourself a penalty.

Do not... 1. White text on a white background (I know what you're thinking, but black on black won't work either.) 2. Hidden text over an image 3. Hiding text with CSS 4. Linking/keywording in tiny text (font size '0' doesn't work either, smarty pants) 5. Linking from a hyphen, period, comma, or any other little character

Keyword Stuffing There are a number of ways to overdo your keyword usage beyond the hidden methods mentioned above. Here are a few to give you an idea of the type of things to avoid.

Do not... 6. Use the Meta Keywords tag. This is a giant waste of time. 7. Use your Title Tag as a place to list keywords. 8. Fill up your Meta Description with keywords, forgetting about click-thru rates 9. Name your images with the character limit in keywords 10. List every city and zip code within a 10 hour drive 11. Put 2000 words of keyword rich content below the footer 12. Keep track of your keyword density (Thankfully, I've heard a lot less from eager website owners on this topic in 2010 than I did in 2009.)

Link Network Schemes If your link building plans involve any of the following, you need to do a little more research on link building. :)

Do not sign up for... 13. Link Schemes 14. Reciprocal Linking 15. Link Farms 16. Link Wheel 17. Link Exchange (unless it is a real and substantial business partnership or relationship) 18. Three Way Linking (or Two-way, Four-way or any other way)

Other Link Types to Avoid Ah links. It isn't just the networks that are a waste of time. Here are some other link acquisition tactics to avoid.

Do not... 19. Forum/comment spam (thanks Rob)

20. Submit to thousands of directories for $12.42. 21. Segment your content and launch sub-domains so you can link to yourself

Publish/Index as Many Pages as Possible Just because you have 4 million pages doesn't mean they should all be indexed. Just because you have come up with a list of 800,000 keywords and misspellings to describe pepper mills, doesn't mean your e-commerce site should have a web page to represent each. Quantity is not quality. More pages in the index does not mean more traffic. Here are a few SEO tactics to remove from your to-do list.

Do not... 22. Try to get the search engines to index all of the search result pages on your site. 23. Publish a new page for every single keyword target.

Google Local Tricks Google Local is still fighting spam that works, which I won't be covering here. Lets not perpetuate the issue, right? Here are a few things that they've figured out and should be avoided altogether.

Do not... 24. Place location keywords in your places page categories. 25. Create a bunch of Google Places pages that all list the same physical address. 26. Torment your customers so you'll get plenty of (negative) reviews. (this one got a lot of attention late last year) 27. Provide different keyword rich business names to local sites.

Random Uselessness Take these ideas straight to the curb. No recycling please.

Do not... 28. Measure your website's strength or success with PageRank. 29. Find out which pages are ranking well and never touch them again. 30. Blindly target keywords just because your competitors are. 31. Submit to hundreds of search engines automatically for $9.99. 32. Use robots.txt to control robot access (I've harped on this before)

If anything here is on your 2011 SEO tactic list, go ahead and cross 'em off. See how I'm helping you out?! No doubt I've missed a bunch of old-school spam. For example, I'm certain I haven't covered every type of link scheme that has ever existed. Let us know what I've missed in the comments below.

272 Comments

nice list of black hat SEO techniques :) well, aparently, the link wheels, link schemes and spam comments continue to work pretty well, since a lot of spammers use these techniques to promote their affiliate websites and they rank high on google, in front of really usefull sites

I have to agree, and mention i've also had success with massive reciprocal linking and 2/3/4 way link exchanges. It really depends if you are a small site struggling to make it (comments, reciprocal and forums are your only choice) or a big brand attracting tons of natural traffic and having money for for PR submissions etc... SMB's can choose either way, depending on how strong their brand is, of course for the long run, whitehat should prove better (though you can start at grayhat for more immediate results and turn white after a while :))

When it comes to white vs. black hat, I agree that white hat techniques should prove better in the long run. They usually also hold steadier in the SERPs in the meantime.

As for the small and medium sized businesses trying to get a running start in the SERPs, I don’t believe they have to turn to old-school link building methods. The search engines have lowered the barrier to entry for start-up websites (provided they are offering something interesting/unique/valuable) by factoring in social media like Twitter and Facebook. Hopefully Social Media as an SEO tactic will help to level out the playing field. Go start-ups!

Ok but why are twitter and FB links any better than comment links and forum links? The fact is that comment links work, they all work, anything that works and does not risk a Google penalty should not be eliminated from an SEO's toolbox. SEOMoz is doing us a disservice when they promote the idea that we should stop doing what works in favor of what "should work" or what "might work".

FB and Twit links are sort of a "safer" investment of your time, because you do not need to worry about them being removed by a moderator or being nofollowed (unlike forums/blog comments).

Second, recent experiments have been suggesting that FB/Twitter links might provide a stronger initial boost to a pages strength than traditional types of links. Key term there being "initial". I'm sure it plays in with Google's love of QDF.

When you say some of these techniques still work, you're right David. But I personally advise against tactics like these for the following reason. Time spent working on the site whether for SEO, Usability or Design, should ultimately be for enhancing the users experience.

I'll use linking for an example. Do bogus link techniques work towards achieving a higher ranking in Google? Yes. But why not rather spend time getting better links that will both bring in more qualified traffic as well as boost the site in the SERPS and not risk being devalued by Google at some point down the road?

Why not write the post that will actually benefit the visitor as well as garner links?

I do admit that sometimes you need a quick win. And to use questionable tactics can give you that quick boost. But once used, they should be replaced by sounder methods that create more value.

I must admit that these "black-hat" techniques works particularly well for us, foreigners SEO. I've talked about it in the past, but I'd say that "english" Web is more mature that any other "(insert language here)" Web... Therefore, it's difficult to find hubs (to get a definition o a hub, read The Art of SEO) sometimes. If I want to find a hub for turkey sandwhichs in Chicoutimi (a far-to-the-north city of Quebec)... I'd say good luck! I'll spend several hours of useless research for my client.

Therfore I must admit that for this kind of challenge, I'd prefer using a few comments links over calling local subway franchisee to ask him if he can put a link to his local competitor on his website (...duh!?).

Squidoo lens? English only! Delicious? English only! Stumblr? English only! (Inser social media here)? A LOT of them are english only! Facebook and Twitter are still there, but as Google mentioned, they don't have access to people's walls, so sharing links there won't work. As for Twitter, they say 1/21000 people use Twitter in my area... I guess I shouldn't relay on that...

While that isn't 100% true, there was a time when links had no value other than one guy saying "Hey, check this other guy's website out!" Then Google came along and put value on links.

Then Google became the source of up to 100% of some companies' revenue stream, and having a page 1 ranking is worth significant amounts in profits, revenue, and more.

This made it advantageous to acquire links in any way possible. Google took care of some of that with the Webspam team, but they are asleep at the wheel now. This isn't debatable - Google's web spam has dramatically increased and the user experience has suffered.

At the same time, people joined Facebook. Some joined Twitter too. Now, what I used to write a blog about... I just post on my Facebook status. And then I include a link there. It's easy and it shows up for the people I've chosen. Maybe I tweet out a link I like. But I don't write a blog entry.

There are two groups involved in linking nowadays: cliques and corps. And by corporations, I don't just mean businesses, I mean anyone who gains something of value by linking out or acquiring a link. This would include publications like TechCrunch, which trade coverage and a link for exclusive information. The other group is cliques. The SEO community is very good about this - I'll link your stuff, you link my stuff, we both prosper. If you link me and I never link you, you'll probably stop linking me because I'm not being a good friend and I don't belong in the clique.

Here's where we are today. In my opinion, 95% of links out there are bought and paid for. It seems somewhat hypocritical of a group of people to say "Well I donate services and you gave money, you are black hat! You are being unethical! I am white hat and I will shine through, and I will win by being honorable and noble!" I don't say that as a critique of the angle of this site, or many of its members, I'm just suggesting we all be honest. There's no such thing as a free link.

While I do preach "create good content and people will come" I mean because they'll hit the Like button, they'll hit the Share button, and they'll Tweet it out. Those sources are still overwhelmingly organic and natural, though if they are emphasized enough some SEO Agency will figure a way to make a lot of money using black hat social media packages. I don't judge social media as right or wrong, I just judge it to be natural and honest right now.

If you are just starting out, and you don't have a clique to link to you, your other option is supplying something of value in order to get a link (something of value.) Whether it's services, a link back, products, or money, you're trading something of value for something of value, and don't be ashamed. It works so long as you judge the quality of your partner. You probably wouldn't enter a business contract with a person who shows up at your office shirtless and stinking of booze regardless of how much value is in that contract, so don't do it online.

Most reasonable white-hats will agree - do what you must. Your livelihood may be at stake, and while white-hats would like you to try their methods, and give them a fair shake, and realize nothing easy is long-term effective, no white hat SEO expects you to be content with writing an article a week, emailing some random people asking them for links, and patiently waiting while you are on page 36 for key search terms and wondering how much you can earn by selling a kidney.

Double thumbs up for the comment Sandro. I wish you'd revise your criteria for publishing a YOUmoz. It doesn't have to have figures, It can just be your opinion. ANd this comment proves you have an opinion we'd all like to hear more upon.

One thing about FB and Twitter: building a credible account with lots of followers / likes and maintaining it for a long period requires tons of work, and is sometimes harder than promoting a single website for a niche longtail, and ptech above is right, for most non-English local Google branches, this is simply a waste of time

I agree with the trading links point you made about cliques. I see all these "scraper" sites like Holy Kaw that scour the net for stories and when you click their feed it just directs you to another site. It totally devalues the reason to even visit these sites when you know as a user you're just chasing a link back to it's originator. This form of content generation is devalues legitimate content by people who write original copy

I read so much about SEO and rankings and PR and on and on that my head spins. I am a small website publisher and am just trying to make a few bucks while providing a website that I hope is useful. I'm starting to feel that nothing I do is going to matter in terms of SEO, it's all just a crap shoot. If I sit around and wait for others to find my content and give me a link out of the kindness of their heart, it's going to be a long, long wait. I'm finding that all the things I thought would work like article marketing and blog/forum commenting are not so effective. So, what's a small business to do to compete?

I read so much about SEO and rankings and PR and on and on that my head spins. I am a small website publisher and am just trying to make a few bucks while providing a website that I hope is useful. I'm starting to feel that nothing I do is going to matter in terms of SEO, it's all just a crap shoot. If I sit around and wait for others to find my content and give me a link out of the kindness of their heart, it's going to be a long, long wait. I'm finding that all the things I thought would work like article marketing and blog/forum commenting are not so effective. So, what's a small business to do to compete?

Many of these tactics do still work, however I think the challenge for search engine marketers today and going forward is experimenting to determine which of these tactics do work and then finding ways to exploit that knowlege while adding more traditional marketing value. For example, if comment spam works (and the data clearly suggests it does) then adopting a strategy of making relevant comments which add value to popular blogs in your industry vertical would be the best way to exploit that knowledge.

THANK YOU! I think suggesting that commenting and forum postings be avoided is somewhat bad advice. i think it has to do with the way an SEO uses these tactics that makes it black hat, not the tactic itself (granted tactics like keyword stuffing are clearly bad ideas). Links serve more purposes then raising SERPs or increasing domain authority. They create presence for a business on the web, in your market place, in your community, and within networks of people with potential interest in your product or service. I believe that the key to this is being authentic, and adding value where ever you get a link, whether it is a relevant comment to a conversation, contributing to a dialogue within a forum, Signing the guestbook of a site that you legitimately like or see value in, or writing and articles that help the web community rather then rave about your business. But stating that SEOs should avoid comments and forums is not a great way to approach the web.

I agree, the ultimate goal of SEO isn't to generate traffic, it's to drive business results. The key word in Lindsay's post is "spam". As Dr. Pete mentioned below, spam might work in the short term, but for a long term business model it's hard to see how it is ultimately going to create beneficial business results.

One thing we see a lot here on Q&A is when these tactics go terribly wrong. It's definitely true that they work sometimes - none of us are naive to that, I don't think. When you over-rely on a single tactic, though (like link wheels or spammy directories) and, eventually, Google catches up, your whole business can crash and burn. If it's a short-term business, like selling iPhone 4 cases, that may not matter. If you're building for the long-term, though, today's spammy strategy that bumps you up a few spots can destroy your business in 6 months.

Regarding #7, "Use your Title Tag as a place to list keywords. How does that compare to this article? http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag

Anyway, spam works. Spam + Good content really works. Good links take a combination of time, money, and luck. If you're a good writer, building quality content takes a lot of time (time that you might not have). If you're not a good writer, good writers cost money(money that you might not have). Either way, you have to hope you can get links to the content! That is, of course, unless you want to hire a link building company - then it just costs more money.

I really like the sentiment of this post and I like the direction that it pushes people (towards making SEOs be perceived as less obnoxious - which is a huge and important task for all of us) however, given the quality of the SERPs of late I don't think it's really fair to suggest that all of these tactics are to be avoided for the sake of efficacy (i.e. "not working anymore" or likely to "hinder your progress").

A lot of the points you make are absolutely a waste of time, but some others seem to be working well at the moment. I know they wouldn't appear on "best practice" lists anywhere, but some of these things certainly do work... and work quite well from the SERPs I've been looking at.

I am totally with you guys all the way that this is not what we want our industry to look like, but a bit sad to say that at the moment a lot of these things are what's working right now and I can't say I blame people for continuing to do what works.

You're right, many of these techniques actually yield some results. Additionally, clients don't care about an SEOs warm-fuzzies for being white-hat. They want results. If you can't outrank spam, you have two options: 1) Blame the spammers and say "it's not fair" (which many people are completely content with doing), or 2) Do what's necessary to get your clients the rankings they paid you for.

The critical thing is being open with your clients about the potential risks and rewards, so they can make informed choices. For better or worse, some of the techniques discouraged herein are definitely still working, but to employ them on a client's behalf without that client being fully informed of the possible positive and negative impacts is a gross breach of duty.

As an aside, I love the debate this white/gray/black hat topic always creates, and the fact that the seoMoz community do a great job of keeping the arguments constructive.

The clients care about results but it is incumbent upon the SEO experts to retain ethics in the industry. The willingness to blur the lines between Black and White hats will destroy us all for when things fail, we all pay for it. Plus look at the financial market, experts engaged in schemes to deliver results for the clients and in the long run the clients and the rest of us paid for it. This too could our destiny....

You said it right. Nothing else to add. From what I am reading in this thread, the best way to go is: 1) follow THE rule of adding great, optimized content that HOPEFULLY will be shared in the vast blogosphere (if you are lucky) using the new and powerful social media instruments, 2) make sure that the pages you write are SEO-friendly (e.g., take care of the meta tags, etc...); 3) get links using the traditional gray hat strategies that our friend Lindsay seems to be so much against making sure you are not pushing too much to prevent penalizations. We all know that here that a site can have the best content on the planet yes without links it will not go anywhere. Aside from the social media tools, I do not think so much has changed since 2005...

This is nothing more than a rehashed article that everybody has read about 300 times. Yes, kinda helpful to some people, but most people who read this blog actually want to learn something new, not that white text on a white background is a bad idea.

Too true about these being old news to us. But I guarantee you there are clients out there wanting to pursue some of these clunkers. And I love that I have a concrete post of "do not's" that I can point them too as a 3rd party endorsement of sorts.

It's safe to say that we should stop using it, but it's still beneficial if our competitors use it. A)It shows that they aren't keeping up with search trends & the obvious B)They are giving away their goal of each page with it on it.

I want to thank everyone in this thread for taking the time to articulate their thoughts and share some opinions with the crowd. I should have known that this would be a hot topic riddled with debate. Though not my most popular post in terms of thumbs (geez, where’s the love?!) the community engagement and discussion are a big win. Thank you 116 times!

There are a few items I need to clear up because I didn’t articulate enough in the first place.

I stand behind this statement: “At best, you could experience a small, temporary boost from some of these tactics. At worst, you'll land yourself a penalty.” Later in the post I got a little carried away with my wording and implied or stated that these items don’t work at all. That was pretty bold and drew a hard line where a soft one would have sufficed.

Point #7, do not use your Title Tag as a place to list keywords, wasn’t clear. The Title Tag is an excellent place to utilize keywords in a creative and user friendly way. I am discouraging the Title Tag as a place to list out a bunch of keywords, in a row.

Point #19 Forum/Comment Spam. I cannot believe how contentious this point was. As a blogger, I see a ton of this garbage and wholeheartedly stand behind my dislike for it. Does it work? Perhaps on some gigantic scale it might move the dial a tiny amount. But really, is it worth pissing off 5000 blog owners and exposing yourself to a penalty when one or two real links would have done the trick? Of course I wasn’t suggesting that you stop participating in blogs by commenting in a useful way but don’t do it for SEO!

#20 & #31 referred to bulk submission services for search engines and directories. There are better ways to get indexed by the search engines. Many directories are great though I’d recommend hand-picking them and carefully crafting your submission to suit the directory instead of taking an outdated bulk submission approach like the spam email offers I get in my inbox.

Thanks again for the lively discussion. I love this community - even the folks who disagree with me... honest. ;)

Good list but I disagree about reciprocal linking. As long as it is with other sites that are about the same kind of topic as your own site, reciprocal linking can work. In fact, it's really the only kind of linking I've done for one of my sites, and it's got me to the first page of the blessed Google! It's not a big niche, but there are some big players that I am outranking, so as long as it's done correctly, there is a place for it!

I think we have to distinguish between legitimate reciprocal linking and not.

Legitimate are, as Lindzie writes, those ones that are justified by "a substantial business partnership or relationship" (for instance clients, providers...). Extending the concept, also citing thematically related sites (for instance in a blog), that are/will linking back to us for similar reasons can be considered legitimate. With legitimate we have to mean justified by the content/context, as they do really add value.

The not legitimate reciprocal linking tactic is the abused "Links" "Resources"... pages, that really do not have any other objective than influencing the bots.

We know that it still works great, even though (Lindzie, Rand please confirm it) it seems Google somehow discounts their value. But I suppose that they are not the only or the main reason a site using them is ranking better than other not using link exchange: I think it would need to be better studied in order to see how much of correlation and/or causation is related to this borderline tactic.

Excellent point. With all of these tactics you have to "distinguish" between what is spam and what is not. Some of these tactics can be used safely as long as the content is valuable and useful to the audience.

The purpose of any content is to add value to it's audience and I enjoyed reading this list so I can say as one user, just as me, that I recieved value from this content. The discussion that followed, weighing the pros and cons of Lindzie's list has also been fantastic. I've actually never posted to the forums before now, so you could say this discussion was so engaging it drew me in.

That's what it's all about, what I always love about Lindzie's content is she makes things worth sharing, and as we talk about the evolved SEO we should follow her example, and for our clients make things worth sharing, worth talking about, and ultimately worth linking to.

That's what will set a good SEO apart from an ineffective one, mastery of adding value to something otherwise boring.

I believe Lindzie was referring to those self proclaiming SEO agencies that promise you to list your site in more than 3.000 high value directories for 9,99 $. Ah... usually those sites are not updated from years and tell you that paying that price you will be also signed in Google, Yahoo!, Altavista, Infoseek, Ask, Lycos... (this list is a real citation of many I see still online).

My view is that if the $299 listing fee for Yahoo! seems to you like a lot of money, it's not worth it. If it's a relatively small budget item, it's probably worth the investment. With business, my experience is that the relative value of time vs. money shifts as your grow and it's in a slightly more mature stage that dir.yahoo.com provides a benefit greater than the time you could spend investing in a comparable marketing effort.

Would you still suggest using the BestOfWeb and Business.com directories? I already renewed the Yahoo one as somehow we managed to get a lead through the actual use of the directory, but from a pure link-power standpoint do you think the other two would be worth the price?

i am very new in seo bussines, but still i would like share my idea's
dir.yahoo is 2nd biggest directory list as i knew,
and most of page's has very high PR
1 of biggest authority website
i belive its worth to pay 25$ for per month

I don't think Google are as good at identifying spam as they say they are. We see so many websites rank highly and use many of the tactics in your post. Especially the text below the footer and the forum spam.

We've even seen websites rank number one using white text on a white background. I would have thought Google would be well ahead of spotting this type of spam.

Do not...19. Forum/comment spam (thanks Rob)Obviously this sort of spam is not helpful to anyone and damaging (both to reputation and potentially rankings) but joining related forums to your industry and being a helpful provider of discussion and information is a great way to source links, both by placing a handful of links back to your site (only where relevant to the conversation and genuinely helpful of course) and by making connections with others interested in your industry / niche.

28. Measure your website's strength or success with PageRank.On this note, I think pagerank is still a decent indicator personally, but I've noticed (probably along with everyone else) that Google hasn't updated toolbar pagerank in a looong time, perhaps since early 2010, so there are a number of sites with an inaccurate PR0 or grayed out PR, so you are right not to use toolbar PR to solely judge the strength of a domain. Thankfully the seomoz toolbar metrics are a godsend in this regard.

I agree, PageRank is not completely useless. It should by no means be the primary metric used to evaluate the quality of a website, but it's often proved useful to at least glance at it. If I'm evaluating a link proposal from a tiny local site that seems to be of good quality overall, seeing that they have a PR of 6 is a fantastic red flag that prompts me to look a little deeper into how the hell they managed it. It usually ends up being some crazy linking scheme that I may not have found had the unusually high PR not tipped me off. So yeah, don't live and die by PR, but don't ignore it either.

Overall I think it's important to note that there are very few absolutes in SEO and no single correct way to do things. Almost everything on Lindsay's list has an exception to the rule. Don't do link exchanges UNLESS the other site is high quality and relevant. If you want to be conservative, stick to known quantities. Don't stuff your title tag full of keywords BUT it's just fine to work your keywords into a descriptive and helpful title tag. Splitting hairs over the article's semantics is fairly useless when it should be understood that nearly everything in SEO is open to some interpretation.

As an observer I can gauge most people here still believe that many of the spammy or borderline spammy tactics still work well if applied correctly. True. 100% Google's fault for allowing spam, but if you relied on easy link building tactics only you're putting yourself at a mercy of algorithm changes.

Let me point out the fact that a lot of SEO people are missing today. And think carefully about this question before you answer it!

If you have 10 hours to spend on link building what would you do?

Go blog comment, social bookmark and do easy link exchange with any site.Result = 50 links

Spend an hour researching link targets that make sense and then connect with sites relevant to your location and industry. Result = 5 links

Yeah but what are you refering to 50 junkey links on social bookmarking sites which every white hat/black hat SEO is using automated software to create?

Or 5 highly relevant links on sites which are high authority?

Dont get me wrong any link is usually a good link, but realy I think in the long term if you are working with the right client (decent sized) and you are creative with your link building then any thing is possible.

To fight against black hat tactics is as epical as the Third Age War was in the Lord of the Rings... with the difference that who owns the Ring the rules them all is somehow distracted by other businesses.

Our @Rishil published few days ago a great post about Spamdexing tactics that still works, and he listed 11 out of 16 that were working in 2006. That means a long way is still to be done before we can see a solution... to not mention that unethical use of legitimate tactics are invented with the same refresh rate of the Algo, or Algos, as now the arena is bigger (not only Search but also Social).

What I miss in your 32 don't, maybe because it is really a borderline tactic, is Scraping (You, Rand and I tweeted about it). Some use of it can be legitimate and give high value too, but many times it is used just to make rank first Adsense sites.

The issue is that Google's quality department seems to be scaling back on their high standards thus allowing a lot of the things on this list to still be efficient. The list is idealistic and demonstrates passion for the Scientific Art that is SEO. Unless Matt Cutts and his team get on the ball, people would still leverage this in the hope short term results to justify to clients that they are doing something. People who have been at it for a while know that this cannot last, because nothing lasts. Remember the Florida update anyone....

I'm coming in on this conversation a little late - but I'm just going to pop in my 2 cents. And use an analogy while doing it ... I'll try not to get too lost while doing so :)

I wouldn't say SEO is dead, but at the same time, SEO doesn't exist in it's pure form anymore - you pretty much can't really call it SEO, anymore than you can call a person past the age of 14 or 15 a child. They've grown and matured into a different version of the human being ... called an adolescent (or teenager, if you will), which requires a massively different approach. After all, you're not going to offer a teenager a lolly to shut-up and keep quiet.

Keeping to that, it's probably a lot more accurate to refer to the industry as search-engine marketing (wanna change your name to SEMMoz maybe? :p ) - since it involves a lot more footwork and creative thinking these days. 4 or 5 years ago, you tweaked the site, got a bunch of links and you were A for away.

Nowadays, you fix your site (not to get rankings anymore though, but to improve your chances of getting them), source some very high-quality links by producing high-quality content, build your brand, engage in both on- and offline marketing, engage with your audience through social media, promote your content (whether using a clique as mentioned earlier or advertising in some way, shape or form) - it's all about building brand these days. We know Google loves brands. I'm pretty much using this as a basis for getting my own site traffic - and you'd be amazed at how little time I've spent actually doing on-site SEO.

That all being said, I'm definitely not going to be crossing all those items off my list of to-do's. Some of them very obviously do work, although relying on them would be a bit of folly - best to say you can use them as a temporary boost to get yourself noticed. Kinda like any new product's massive pre-launch marketing campaign ... get people to come look, and hopefully you have what's needed to get them to mention you and keep coming back. A mix of marketing and CRM maybe?

Hmmm... there are some good "do nots" in here, but lets be honest here, some of of your "do nots" seem to be based on jumping on a "wholesome" bandwagon with broad generalizations. I would say spot on with 60% of your reccomendations, but the other 40% could still be part of a healthy SEO strategy.

With respect, this could have been a list of things to avoid in 2010. Some of the suggestions are things to avoid from as back as 2000. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the post for its ability to generate discussion.

Number 23, for example, could be its own topic. Do you want to publish a new page for every keyword target? Maybe. I agree with you if you're selling a product or service where there's 300 ways to say the same thing. In home security, for example, you can basically take the words "home," "alarm," "system," "camera," and "security," and throw them in any combination you'd like. It doesn't make any sense to make hundreds of pages for each variation.

Suppose, though, that you are targeting product names for niche products. It doesn't make any sense to target more than one product per page. In this instance, you do want a new page for each keyword.

Something that works for me is putting a "geo tag" on the end of the same keyword to rank for different cities, i.e. "photography houston tx" or "photography sugar land tx". I use the same keyword, and this gets me ranking well for the same keyword over and over, just a different geography. Throw a "net" over the city you are trying to rank for by listing the small associated towns around a major metro area.

We recently received an SEO proposal for a site, which we turned down after having a read through all of the spiel they sent us. It's quite worrying how similar their documentation of tactics was to the list you've created!

I'm glad I've paid for a membership here long enough to know the difference between quality work and not. The problem it would appear though is that not many people have this advantage; I put it down as a business expense citing I need to understand what someone is doing for me. The fact that many other business owners don't seem to think like this is what helps propagate these tactics on the net; the fact that they still work and the fact they can be done for cheap. Which helps 'SEO Companies' get quick rankings, cheaply; which is what most smaller businesses are happy to pay for.

The problem is at some point (hopefully) Google is going to catch up with the tactics employed by these firms; and who's going to get burnt? The smaller businesses who think they've had quality work done. Our small business website brings in lucrative leads for us, and in the current economic times losing an avenue like this could be very costly.

It's going to be really interesting to see what happens in 2011. Google dropped the ball last year, when it comes to spam (in my opinion). They were pushing so hard to compete against the Bing/Yahoo merger, roll out Caffeine, and slap on tons of new features, that they reallocated resources away from spam fighting. I think they're waking up to that, and I think they're going to hit some tactics hard this year. I suspect (and I see some evidence of this in Q&A) that webmasters who over-rely on black-hat tactics are going to find the next 12 months a rough ride.

We'll see. Personally, I'd love to drop some of these techniques, as I find many boring and creatively unsatisfing. If Google ever gets around to making quality content worth a damn on the SERPs, I'll be glad to put ScrapeBox on hold ;)

I think Google has much too much to lose. Their entire add revenue ($20B+) is dependent on search quality. Forget SEOs - if regular consumers give up on Google and go to Bing, billions are at stake. Google makes mistakes, but I think they take search quality seriously.

What may be obvious or crusty news to us may be a sincere revelation to our clients. As I mentioned to Lindsay, this month a big brand client asked about using the same colored text as background. It's easy to say, "Yeah, I know," and roll my eyes. Except that this person is intelligent and well-meaning. He wants to balance design with SEO. He also accepted my explanation and quickly moved on. I am glad he asked; he is thinking and participating. It's another reason I enjoy working with high-caliber clients.

SEO is actually so simple - Forget all the old tricks that just get you in trouble as the search engines become smarter. All you have to do is to have the best and most relevant content for your keywords. With that in place links sharing via social media starts, links start pouring in and with every change on the algorithm your site moves up with out you having to worry about it. That's it.

For most of the big niches but it is never going to be simple to rank. Sure if you work for random local terms then yeah it is very simple. But if you want to be up with the big boys & Girls in SEO for huge terms then yeah it is not a walk in the park it is all about age/volumes and trust levels. You can not meerly create volumes off links over night unless you have very good link bait ideas and the average SEO does not have these ideas.

Experiment, experiment, experiment. That is the best way to determine if your SEO tactic is still working or not in 2011. We have different points of view when it comes to SEO so to prevent such debate on which SEO method will be the best in 2011 try to experiment. If you get on the top using that SEO method then you can share it, but expect that many SEO will turndown your strategy/suggestion. So the best thing to do is to experiment for yourself.

This is the first time I've ever thumbed down an SEOMoz post. Maybe this is good advice, but while almost every single tactic you outline appears to be working perfectly for most of what I see on page one of Google's results it can't be the way to go. You can only ever play a game using the rules that are currently in force - and right now, there are virtually none it would appear.

Nope, that exactly what I meant - a lot of what she's saying don't do...a lot of people are doing, and achieving a lot out of doing it. I suppose another way I could put it is:

1) Sure, you shouldn't be doing any of these things from an ethical/quality standpoint but

2) If you want traffic a lot of them are pretty good bets right now.

I'm certainly not saying I think this is a good thing, and ultimately it's Google's fault for allowing "bad" practices to give "good" results. If this was something that was just happening right now I would've said nothing...but it's been going on for months and months now.

Ahh... The "do's" and "don'ts" of SEO. I've read a few comments here "is seo dead?", "why should we not do it if it works", etc.

I think the misunderstanding here is assuming that all sites have the same goal in mind. And that goal is to be a long (read: forever) lasting business. This is primarily the audience that SEOmoz is written for.

When I ask my prospective clients if SEO is right for them. My first question is "what are your goals" and "what risks are you willing to take", will answer a bunch of questions as to which type of SEO might be the best approach for their site.

It's important to remember Google isn't the law. They're more like an elementary school playground bully. They control who gets to play on what toys, and when and where. But lets say you want to ride the swings, but the bully won't let you.

So you have to come up with a way to be able to play on the swings.

Now you have to determine if you just want to swing for a little while, and get your fill, then go play on another toy. Or if you want to be able to come and go and ride the swings as often as you want.

This will determine how you go about getting to ride the swings. maybe you just distract the bully, or tell him a lie that lets you ride until he finds out you were lying--but he may not figure out the lie for sometime. Or you spend the time to befriend the bully, so then he'll let you ride whenever you want. The downside is, it takes a lot longer to befriend the bully, than to tell him a lie.

So it is really going to depend on how much time, effort and resources you can devote to being his friend vs. just telling him a quick lie to get your fix.

haha! Sadly that's the problem with having an older homegrown CMS. We deal with the same problems here at SEOmoz that any organization goes through when it comes to SEO. You have to prioritize, and some things always find their way lower on the totem pole. However I don't see how this has anything to do with this post. Having a long meta description is probably silly at best, but it's not going to harm you in any way, nor was it mentioned in this post.

G - I'm dying to see your concrete evidence that search engines no longer use the meta description when indexing. I'm not saying it's false, but from my reading and understanding, google (and others) still weigh some importance on it. Unlike the keyword tag.

It is true, that they do decide what description to show based on relvent page content, and DMOZ listing at times, but there are times where the META Desc. trumps all of that.

I think that this http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35264 and this http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/meta-description can answer better than I could to your question.

On the other hand, we could affirm that it has an indirect SEO consequence, because a good Meta Description will act as a CTR enhancer, and what it is not so so clear is if CTR could be one of 200+ ranking factors.

Wow! I just read the second link and they propel some very confusing information. They say that it doesn't effect rankings in that article, however, in their "SEO For beginners" PDF - They say it might. Possibly throwing us off the trail? Thanks for this information, genuinely.

Snippet I'm referring too:"Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don't use the description meta tag in our ranking."

@Digital10Media - this past spring/summer, this issue came up regarding whether Google still factors the Meta Description. It came up after Maile Ohye, senior developer programs engineer at Google, had been talking about their relevance.

Someone had misquoted her, with the end interpreted claim that they are now, once again counting it in relevance evaluation. Except she didn't say that. It was a complete mis-quote. Lots of people chimed in, and several of us, just to be sure, went and conducted tests, to varying degrees of scientific, or lack of scientific process. Not one single test by anyone participating showed in any clear, verifiable, repeatable way that the Meta Description field is being used for relevance.

If you would like to read more about this, you can visit Search Marketing Wisdom and read my article on it with links to others.

I'm really sad to see so many people on here advocating blogspam in the comments. Yes, there are instances where it does work, but wouldn't you rather spend your time adding genuine value to your client's site and use link building strategies that are better long term?

I actually see the argument being made..."why take the time and create good content/posts/relationships when I can just stuff kw's into on page factors and build a mountain of blogspam to support it"?!?!?

I work with a few large clients that take on very competitive kw phrases that we rank really well for and the mention of using blogspam as a link building tactic will get you laughed out of the room.

Can some other veteran SEO's weigh in on this? Do you really use blogspam as a link building strategy!?!

A lot of us work for small businesses that don't even have meeting rooms to laugh SEOs out of. They just want to get their head above water and survive, and they hope SEO can be that breath of fresh air. Since these businesses usually don't have the budgets to let us play Easter egg hunt with juicy links, we're forced to work within our time constraints. Of course you get to do white-hat for large clients. The New York Times is about as white hat as it gets: Their content attracts links on its own! Now consider how much money they're paying all the staff writers they employ. For most small businesses, the best way to maximize return is to automate some processes in the background while looking for valuable links. That way, if you can't find someone willing to link to a car repair company in Marshall, Texas with a non-existent SEO budget, you at least have something to show for.

I manage marketing and SEO for a small business and we rank extremely well based mostly on our content and relevancy. We have some linking but it's not something I focus heavily on (mostly because of time constraints but also because of the nature of the industry - there aren't a ton of blogs relevant to our topic and the industry forums would take away way too much time out of my day). I have yet to resort to any black hat tactics and I'm not afraid to put my foot down and tell someone I won't do a technique being suggested if I feel it's irrelevant or spammy. Small businesses who just need to rank locally for their keywords, I think (from my experience), have it a little easier than the small businesses trying to rank nationally.

Thanks, glad to hear it. I know there are some questionable techniques out there everyone tries out at some point...However, I thought everyone in the Moz community was totally against blogspam until I saw some comments on this post..

From my perspective as one of the people who manages the blog and all the spam we get, it's a huge time suck. Not only does it waste my time but it's a waste of time for the commentor as well. When they come to our site they have to register, confirm via email, then leave a comment. Then sometime later I (or any of the staffers or associates) not only deletes their comment but bans them as well. time. suck.

Hi Linday - nice list. But I think there are a lot of points which a "normal" SEO would not use since long long time ... But probably you are right - there will be still enough people which use that kind of work.

I remember not long time ago I was reading something here(I believe it was in A&Q). It was about how to use your other sites to promote a money site. And one of the recommendations was to use the other sites for link exchanges(you link me and I'll link from somewhere else), technically this is a 3 way link exchange. So, this is really confusing, should we do it or not? I'm thinking that even people that work at SeoMoz have different opinions, so I'm not surprised to see so many thumbs down.

Aren't you breaking your own rule #3 with 'show comments' and 'hide comments' buttons? CSS is used hide/show text. Or is the fact that the default is to show the comments enough to consider this rule not broken?

Nice article and I agree with almost all of it. But I can't agree about link wheels. Link wheels as I understand their common meaning now (optimised content with contextual links pointing to your site, hosted on authority domains/Web 2.0 properties) are very effective if done correctly, and they're not by definition black-hat either (although they can be abused of course, like any SEO tactic).

While link wheels may have some positive impact, it is not due to their being recognized as acceptable link building. it's due to the fact that Google might have some difficulty in weeding out some link wheel schemes.

To be clear, link wheels are not an SEO best practice. I've personally seen several previously well positioned competitor sites drop to the Google vortex after their link wheels were caught by the algorithm this past year.

Just because something may in fact provide ranking value does not make it a best practice.

The usual list of "don´ts" from squeaky clean seomoz. Reciprical links work, blog comment links work, directories work, publishing content works, linking from forums works. When you look at all the places you are not supposed to get links from, what are you left with? Your mate who works at the newyork times giving you an editorial link, and creating some masterpiece of viral linkbait. I am not saying spam everywhere, but the majority of these techniques still have their place and provide bread and butter links for many small businesses that do not have super interesting content or mates in high places.

One of my client's biggest competitor is ahed of my client due to their links to link farm types of directories. Very frustrating to see Google not staying on top of this better.

Saw results of black hat SEO again with a woman who called for an evaluation of her website, which she was ranking quite well for in regards to many of her key terms but wanted more page one Google rankings for other key words. I warned her about her websites hidden links to link farms and sites completely unrelated to her site, which she paid for from somebody in Romania - but she wouldn't believe me as the results were enough for her. Again frustrating.

Honestly...why would you care about an initial boost in ranking? You know what's going to hang you in the long run? When that boost gives out and you slip down to the bottom of the page. Your clients will be rather put off by this, and you definitely won't get any referral business. Don't just do what works, do what makes sense.

If you have a small clients, they make not care how black your hat is. If you've got larger clients that spend several thousand a month for top tier service, if you knowingly implement black hat tactics not only will they cut your contract, they'll sue you into the stone age.

Think your contract is ironclad? Try taking on a team of $800/hr lawyers and see how that works out for you.

Just do it right. If you can't rank with a certain tactic, switch tactics.

Making The devil advocate now. The initial boost will put you in the first places. If your site is not a real crap, that ranking will lead to natural not spammy links (for instance if you have really valuable content). Gaining natural links you consolidate your rankings, therefore you have the security to work only with WH tactics. If you are good, the site become a trusted one, no matter those "embarrassing" old half spammy links. And being a trusted site, probably Google won't ban you.

An SEO Company in the UK who recently we went to for a proposal gave us some example sites that they had worked on and had, to be fair, got some good rankings for. However, when I nosing around the client sites and also doing a little basic analysis on the SEO site I found white links on a white background on the homepage's of several of the client sites too the SEO's site. And I'll give you one guess as to what the anchor text of these links were..

Which put me off this pretty sharpish, but how many other people noticed I wonder..

I see this post has some thumbs down comments. I guess it's because some of these techniques are still working. I think we should do some of the techniques mentioned here as long as it is beneficial to the people visiting the sites. I think the Rotary 4-way Test should be applied when building links

I don’t think I or anyone else that thumbed this down “missed the boat” (I assume you mean “missed the point”) at all. I think there are two main reasons why this article hasn’t gone down well with large sections of the readership:

The title of the post is misleading. By entitling it with the year 2011 implies that these are new things to be avoided. The inference is that until very recently it was ok to do these things if you want to go down the white hat route. If it was sold more clearly that the post was about tactics which were deemed acceptable when dinosaurs roamed the Earth then that wouldn’t be so bad. There’s no new material here of note.

Perhaps more importantly, a lot of these tactics still work as pointed out by a lot of SEOs in their responses. I’m fortunate enough to work on huge sites so I can do “clean” SEO. However I have worked in little agencies where the pressure for quick results is immense. The fact is a lot of these tactics are necessary for many SEOs. I don’t like it, I don’t agree with it, but they work, because Google isn’t perfect. It’s against their rules and might come back to bite you in the bum down the line, but if you need quick results then the Dark Side is very seducing.

I say good on people for not succumbing to the blind “great post” mentality here, because the sycophantic nature of some respondents is somewhat grating at times. As has been mentioned above by another poster, this is a respected industry blog and as such the quality of posts expected is very high. I’m sure there is a pressure to produce a new post every day for this site, and hey, I’m not even paying to be here(!) but if you willingly put the content out there, you’ve got to accept the rough with the smooth, the adulation and the criticism. (By the way I’m not saying the authors don’t, they are generally very good at responding to feedback).

I hope this is viewed in the light in which it is intended, as constructive criticism and as an explanation as to why I didn’t like the original post. I’d not justify why I thumbed someone down in such depth if I wasn’t trying to be helpful.

Haha Bludge. You're absolutely right. Missed the point is a much better metaphor. I'll have to let CaseyHen know. I get all my old man sayings and metaphors from him.

At the risk of sounding like an SEOmoz fanboy (disclaimer: I am an SEOmoz fanboy, I just don't want to sound like one) I don't think the title of the post is at all misleading. I read it more like "It's 2011 and these are things that should be avoided."

And you're right. A lot of those tactics do work...now. But the question remains how long will they continue to work? And if you put time and energy into them today to the exclusion of more sound tactics, you place your website and your future earnings at risk when Google reshuffles the algorithm.

I suppose it all boils down to where the reader is coming from. I come from the viewpoint of build relevant, useful and usable sites for a bigger better win. So I read Lindsay's post as a refresher of tactics to avoid because they didn't contribute to my particular "viewpoint"

Finally, I agree with you that "great post" comments can be a bit herd like. But at the same time people that are hard pressed for time might only have 5 more seconds before they have to get back to work so it's acase of something is better than nothing. I tend to be extremely forgiving when judging posts as well as comments. Posts are not easy to write and even when I disagree with comments, the fact that the person took the time to turn thoughts into words deserves a thumbs up. I think the only time I thumb down is for spammers.

I enjoyed going through the list and agreeing completely with all of the black hat techniques. Some I still use such as the meta keyword tag and robots.txt file. I'm wondering how detrimental they are to a campaign or is it that they are simply of no benefit?

Through misuse over the years the Meta keyword tag has become almost insignificant. I have actually made it a personal goal to remove it from all the pages on all of the sites I optimize. It is a roadmap that your competitors can follow to find out what you want your pages to target, and most search engines have come out and said - "we ignore this completely".

Just my 2 cents.

Great post, i agree with almost everything you have said. I also don't recommend people just halting their process, but weening into a newer, better, richer content focused version of SEO.

Always remember, our jobs as SEOS is to provide answers to the people with questions. Not just answers, but the best answer.

It can be a roadmap of what keywords you are targeting, or it can be a list of generic words that trick your competitors into thinking you are targeting them, potentially throwing them off the real paying phrases.

Having the knowledge about meta keywords, would you actually take it into consideration while doing competitive analysis? Isn't it more important to look at title, decription tags and the text in the body ( as well as any H1,2,3 tags and examining anchor text of links incoming to particular page ). Also, as we know, some may be deliberately changing meta keywords, so why would anyone here with, as I suppose sound knowledge of SEO would even consider looking at meta keywords?

The Meta Keywords is a great definitive conversion tool from the SERPs to the Page being optimized. Why be #1 if #2 gives a better description and makes a better appeal for its content to be relevant to the search query. Ponder upon that....

Everyone here is debating whether or not some of these tactics really should be avoided, correct?.. If they are indeed a waste of time, or a valuable quick fix?

At the very least we can all agree that the majority of the controversial items on this list would be considered Black Hat, yes? With that thought I would like to remind everyone of a certain, simple fact...

What a secure way to start 2011!
I am completely agree with you.. On page factor and link system is totally worthless for organic work as per my point of view.. its give benefits in sometimes but not exatly

Interesting article, but it's sort of controversial one. I mean... "let's make people talk".

Well, some of those tips are just essential of SEO, not meant for 2011 only, but you could apply them 8 years ago as well, but of course its good to mention about it still (1-5 tips).

What I do not like in the article, it's just GENERAL, and there is no individual approach for businesses. What do I mean? It's some list of what to do if you have big company in US.

For many other businesses, small, specialized - twitter? facebook? ok, they are maybe cool and trendy, but are they essential for every business? I suggest to avoid facebook and twitter if you have specialized businesses.

Let's say I'm a lawyer: It seems strange to me if I add "FACEBOOK LIKE ME" or "TWITTER ME" on my website, don't you think? Let's go further... if I'm a lawyer... I guess forum comments and other sorts of comments with link in signature, are something really meaningful as long as I talk on forums where lawyers opinions are valuable, and they give me some businesses in the future, yeah maybe they won't help me with rankings... SO WHAT? they won't cause google penalize me. I believe my advice on forums would help people, while (let's say it, facebook is not meant for that at all!).

And also like someone else mentioned, what if my website is not english type of? or even it's not in US? many countries just do not use facebook nor twitter.

I'm not saying the post is bad, it's very interesting. What I mean... every business has different approach, and before considering any SEO plan, it's the first thing to keep in mind, then the budgets, other factors... and then choose SEO dos/donts.

Also, what's wrong with meta keywords? they are not a waste of time, I won't suggest spend hours optimizing it, but give yourself 3 minutes won't hurt, the tag still is meant for keywords. Maybe for google it doesn't work, maybe... one day it will matter some way, who actually knows? but they won't hurt you I guess...

i have been noticing that the smaller sites using spam links have been falling in SERPS recently and the larger sites like Amazon have been showing up on more SERPs. Anyone else seeing that? Is this a result of Google devaluing low-value links?

Am I understanding the robots.txt advice correctly? I often use the robots.txt to remove junk directories in CMS's such as www.mydomain.com/admin/. I check the SERP results for junk using site:mydomain.com and anything I see in there like the junk pages you have shown such as pages that display as links with no content on the results. Shown here: http://www.seomoz.org/img/upload/digg%20submit%20serp.jpg

Are you suggesting we shouldnt be doing this at all and should be using only noindex meta method?

I find this hard to believe as with every CMS there will be multiple directories that need blocking.

I am new to SEO. I started in March '10 and published my 1st site in June. Did lot of Seo for the next 3 months and stopped promoting the site in Aug' 10 as I was not making any headway thinking it was a tough niche. I strated another site and was busy promoting it and got some results in SERPs by Nov 10' . I checked on my 1st site in dec '10 to see that 2 pages were ranking on 1st page of google and 3 pages on page 2 of google... Any idea how that happened without doing any backlinking for the last 3 months????

Point 22 - 'Don't try to get the search engines to index all of the search result pages on your site.'

Quite agree, but if you had a site of, say, 150 pages, what would be the criterion for deciding which to index and which not? If the content is well-themed, just the higher-level section pages? I'm working on such a new site right now and am very curious!

There's a lot of comments, so this was probably already mentioned. But blog commenting can be an effective way to build links still. Comment spamming - absolutely not! But taking the time to read and intelliently comment on a high domain authority, dofollow blog works well for us.

That's fair enough... if you're relationship building that's one thing - I do wish people would stop with the auto-comments though. It's really tedious, and a surprising amount gets through the spam filters.

OK thank you very much for letting us know what we can't use. But what we could or should use? How am I suppose to get better SEO through Google if I cant use none of above? Where can I find more concrete info on what to use and what is allowed by Google crawlers?

Measure your website's strength or success with PageRank <---- I definitely agree with this. A lot of web masters are so conscious about their page rank when in fact the website doesn't actually have much visitor.

Hiding stuff on page and keyword stuffing are bad seo practices. Not because it will result in penalty or something but it makes the website look spammy and thus it is hard to get editorial links. Regarding link exchange i wont say it is a waste of time. Many websites in a topical community link out to each other. For e.g. seomoz is linking out to distilled, seo gadget, search engine land and vice versa. Isn't this is a link exchange? Yes it is. But Google try to determine the intent of linking partners when link swapping takes place. If large number of link exchange takes place on a single page or with completely unrelated websites then it can be a sign of link manipulation. I would infact go ahead and recommend link exchange with topically relevant sites. Not on one single page like 'links' but on deep pages between text. I have to agree with 'iulian lita' above. As long as spammers continue to get benefits (even short term boost) from dodgy seo tactics, no amount of persuasion, 'not to do' lists or even warnings by Google is going to stop them.

Definitely I will keep these in mind. To tell you honestly, I was doing that forum spamming before. But I've learned my lesson. Anyways, what can you say about the Domain Authority of the site? What would the good DA for me to follow a site?

Really great list of things not to do ... but wheres our list of things to do ;)

With ref #7 using a title to "buy keywords" is something I advise against doing ... your content is the most important bit but your title tag is important on serps... use it to seel the page and say whats in the page not buy words like "hotel india" etc by repeating it in several different forms.

While, I agree no SEO consultant worth his/her name would use such techniques I can point to a number of high ranking sites that use many of these tactics and apparently they are getting away with it. If the garbage didn't work people wouldn't use it. In fact, I know of one site off the top of my head that has a link farm which republishes a duplicate of their site, linking to the main site and to hide this they have created a massive amount of "blank space" at the top of the duplicate web page. The site also keeps a great deal of hidden text stuffing keywords. Where is it? Penalized, Nope! It is right on page one for a high traffic keyword.

A great post for beginners. Of course, some of those things have varying definitions for different people (e.g. levels of keyword stuffing), but I think the key point to take away is that SEO should be subtle.
- Jenni

I kind of feel like i'll be beating a dead horse, but if you are providing value added comments and reviewing industry & niche directories then those strategies are still useful to a degree. Much like any of our link building strategies they cannot be heavily leaned upon and need to be diverse in nature. Yeah, if someone automates submitting to 1,000 directories then chances are 99.5% of those will not be useful and provide no value to the web.

Also the age of the website I believe plays a factor in the link strategy. A brand new website may need some fundemental things to kick it off.

For number 7, I was wondering if you can maybe elaborate on that point. Title Tags do not seem like they will lose their weight anytime soon. Perhaps the algorithms have changed towards mixing up more tags to rank websites, but I still think Title is very important to have keywords in.

Nothing is wrong with meta tags, per se - the article is simply advising against using them for the simple reason that you'd be wasting the time you invest in them for no measurable return (that's how I read it). But you need to look at the specific tags seperately:

Meta-description: Not completely worthless - they won't help your rankings any, but a well crafter description can help boost CTR from the SERPs - same principle applies in PPC campaigns when you're writing ads

Meta-keywords: Basically useless. They won't harm, but they won't help any either. So you're wasting your time by researching the keywords to put in them, and them to get around to including them as well. They do nothing for you. So no return on investment in any way shape or form. I believe Yahoo! still looks at them in some way, but if it does affect ranking, the differences is going to be so marginal you would probably still consider it a waste of time to research & implement.

The first (the title of a link) seems not having a great SEO value, accordingly to 2009 SEOmoz Ranking Factors Survey (that collected the opinions of several high considered SEOs). It is a W3C standard, therefore it is a good coding practice.

About the second, I think you forget that crawlers are like text-only browsers, therefore they see the Alt txt as the description of images they do not see. Said that, the WHat rule should be to use it to give a synthetic description of the image it is referring to, and not to use it as a place to stuff with over optimized keyword text. Therefore, as any SEO tactic, it is not only acceptable but also strongly suggested (it seems to have more influence on on site than the H1, for instance), but can be also used in order to influence the bots.

Reciprocal Linking and Link Exchange – I need some help with the subtleties. I get the value of links between sites with a substantial business partnership or relationship & I get the knock against exchanges between off-topic unrelated sites.

What about links between sites with related topics? What are the issues here? Do they work? Are they discounted by Google? Are they likely to be discounted by Google? Are they a waste of time?

I am little bit confuse with following statement. "Blindly target keywords just because your competitors are." I am working on eCommerce website & my target keyword is Office Chairs. In December 2009: I have started work with long trail keywords & got top 10 ranking but, did not able to recieve handsom amount of traffic. We decided to jump in to root keyword like office chairs due to competitor's focus. Right now, I am getting maximum visits with help of this keyword. I am not opposing your statement but want to share my experience. Any one can add some more on it.

It's not a bad idea to research competitors keywords, and to target them. My take on what Lindsay meant was more along the lines of:

Do your own due diligence when researching keywords. Just because your competitor is targeting certain keywords doesn't mean you should do exactly what they do. Only target keywords that make sense for your business.

So in your case Anand, office chairs might be a perfect keyword to go after. But if your competitor also pushes hard for "office chairs delivered free" and free delivery doesn't match your business model, then you skip targeting that keyword combo, even if your competitor is getting traffic from it.

My personal motto is "the keywords you use to bring people to your site should also enhance their search experience". In other words, the keywords you pick should be indicative of your ability to satisfy the intent of the searcher. So when they click on your result in the SERP, they arrive at your page and immediately see that it's exactly what they were looking for.

I am 100% agree with you. But, I want to give very straight example. I am approching to get higher rank for Office Chairs keyword. If you will visit top 10 websites so, maximum websites have same products which I have. BTW: We are selling many products cheaper than our competitors. I can understand that, in organic eCommerce SEO price does not matter. This can work over Google shopping during compare list. Right? But, If We are selling product cheaper, Free shipping, 30 day money back guarantee & $10.00 OFF over $100.00 with Google checkout so, If some one will visit to my site so, visitors can find out great deal compare to top 10 websites. I have also mind bubbles : Why should I am not getting top 3 ranking with Office Chairs keyword? Answer of this question require too much R & D plus optimization. But, What's quick deal for me? I am searching for that & applying one by one on my website. Hope so, one accurate method will work for my website. Thanks again for your reply.

So... Does anyone know how to handle if there are two legitimately and completely different businesses at the same address that share a phone number ? I have one business that has been under review for quite some time on Google local. I tried using the mobile on one business and the land line on another but the powers that be have flagged it. One is a massage and natural therapies business and one is web design so no relation at all. (luckily for my clients that its a pretty rare situation and I don't have any trouble with their places page lol)

I remeber the days when large link wheels were the shit, and you could pretty much create one and rank for decent keywords. sure enough every man and his dog caught onto the trend and then it was impossible to use them.

I agree with alot of your point from a link building aspect it is always best to be as natural as possible, especially if you are dealing with clients who are from a Government back ground.

Sure enough if you work in SEO for a gambeling website or adlut website sure go use eveyr dirty black hat trick in the book becuase yeah those niches are full of that stuff.

I think the problem with SEO is their are soo many different niches where you have soo many different styles of SEO. For example I mostly work on High Level clients these days but in the past I have worked in the SMB's and even worked on some gambeling/Adult sites so I know the type of dirty work which goes on out their but for blue chip clients you never want to use these tactics.

All excellent tips and common practice for those of us who follow the "law." Do have one question, #27 Provide different keyword rich business names to local sites. What does this mean? Like micro sites? Subdomains or completely separate websites that just have a bunch of keywords? I've seen this a lot in the service industry. A paint company might have 4-5 micro sites that are keyword rich, custom urls, completely separate branding and even separate mailing addresses. Is this what you are referring to as NOT to do?

David - What I was referring to there was the practice of telling the various IYPs, from whom Google gets local data, that your business has a variety of names. For example, a business owner might submit that they are called "Gary's Painting" to Yelp, "Gary's Renovations" to SuperPages.com, and "Gary's Handyman Services" to CitySearch.com when in fact only the first business name is the accurate one. This is seriously spammy stuff. Does that help clear things up?

Ok, let not take my 1st phrase as a personal attack... I simply wanted to say that in an ideal world that way of doing SEO should have to be dead, just that. We all know (me first) that really it is not so.

being a Mozzer from so far, you should know that I too see SEO as a part of a more holistic web marketing strategy, and that I do not consider SEO in a "before 2003 just technical" way (I invite to read this YouMoz of mine).

Simply I consider that the philosophy/methodology behind the SEO discipline is now pervading all the web marketing. And, IMHO, SEO won't be dead until 1 person will feel the need to search something, whatever Search tool he will use.

It is not here the place to start a discussion about "SEO is Dead", but I think that SEO is dying constantly as it transforms itself constantly expanding its tentacles in any Internet Marketing field.

About the WebApp of SEOmoz suggesting to use many of the tactics Lindsay had listed, let me disagree with you.

When, in the On Page Report Card, it is said "Avoid Keyword Stuffing in Document", "Avoid Keyword Stuffing in Page Title", "Avoid Keyword Stuffing in the URL" and so on.

More over, digging in the past of this site, you could find that Rand himself had problems because he had denounced in a blog post the uselessness of many directories.

In many posts and guides and public Q&As SEOmoz (Staff and Associates) repeat constantly that, for instance, meta description does not have an SEO function, therefore it is simply a waste of time to fill it with keywords.

And when it comes to links, I honestly had never read a line from SEOmoz claiming the goodness of black hat linking practices.

SEO is not dead. SEO is evolving into something more. As the nature of the business matures, trying to simply grab anchor text links from every imaginable low quality source is likely to become increasingly less effective.

This thread is going on and on, I feel like I could get lost in these comments all day. Oh crap, did I just become a forum troll?

This is an amazing discussion and I really respect the list but unfortunatly the debate of comment spam continues and what I really love above is the destinction between "Comment Spam" and "Community Involvement" whereby you join a community and contribute to the conversatio, thus yourself becoming something worth linking to, via your contribution.

I've always said that if you're worth talking about, you're worth linking to, and SEO is very much alive and well however as has been loosely said above SEO is becoming a spam tool, where Internet Marketing or Web Marketing or whatever you want to label it, is this evolved process where we let content lead our linking, we post something worth linking to.

It follows Seth Godin or Dale Carnegie science, if you do something remarkable, if you create something of value, the people will follow. So the SEO is someone who might create devalued spam, where the evolved Internet Marketer instead looks at a client, be they a small business or an enterprise client, and finds the ways that their content can share value.

I'd say that the true 2011 Guide to SEO is about adding value, adding purpose, to the content of our clients. Spam can work, in the short term, in the temporary, but up against a true Internet Marketer (with the force as his ally) who is using compelling content to EARN links just as much as they are getting that content out almost like a PR person would, this hybrid SEO rethinking creates something new.

Well I am not sure about the web app itself, but link sculpting is something that has been suggested on this site, and that takes lots of pages in the index and also a page for each keyword ( not 800,000 of them ok) they were a couple that I though a bit ambiguous

Nice list lindzie, you are right we should avoid all those tactics. But I think 32 is not enough to avoid spammy tactics there are several which we've to avoid.

There are other posts also who speak about things to avoid in seo but people are still using it not because they think it's spammy but they are living under the impression that these will bring their site up in the rankings which is ofcourse not possible.

Yes, I agree with above commentor that testing these tactics can provide us with the results whether they are working or not.

I'm going to chime in on this one. I see comments such as yours posted frequently across all the top search marketing blogs and forums in response to what you, I and many others already consider "common sense". The issue however, is that this industry is filled with people who, regardless of time in the industry, still don't know, consider, or implement true across-the-board best practices.

Some don't because they have mostly learned on their own, and might just now be exploring more information. Others might have explored some information previously and ran with what they learned, though it meant lacking thorough research. And there are countless other reasons.

Just by reading the comment threads here, and seeing how many questions, clarifications, and other dialogue this article generated in regard to specifics on various points shows that it's healthy to have this kind of list for our industry to refer to.

Even if someone thinks they know everything, at the very least it causes us to pause momentarily and at the worst, confirm that we are on the right track.

And on a final note, I'd suggest that maybe articles offering information beyond this would benefit from being labeled "extremely advanced" for someone such as yourself if you feel you know as much as you do. To help you skip everything else. And in the mean time, the rest of us can continue to discuss these topics, regardless of our own previously understanding.

Awesome post Lindsay! I love "Do Not..." posts, because so often we're told what to focus on, but the most difficult element of this business is deciding what to filter out (leaving only the best things to focus on).

Please please please tell me you did not just use TopSEOs as an actual useful source for "ranking" SEO companies. From my understanding TopSEOs "ranks" companies based on how much money they pay them. So I don't think that reference is going to hold any smoke around here. The fact that the top ranking SEO companies showing up there say that they can get you that many backlinks is a HUGE red flag that not only are those companies spammers, but that TopSEOs doesn't actually "rank" anything based on how good a company really is.

Sorry for the very untimely reply, I think I may have not put my message across correctly. Let me reiterate - Many of the well known Agencies in both the US and UK do use some form of the tactics outlined in this Article. How do I know that?

Because some of the companies I have worked for have used their services.

I am talking about what I would consider some of the most reputable agencies on the planet - and I do not want to sully their names as it is not my intention to expose them but I kid you not, they definitely do use some of the tactics mentioned above.

To shed some light on Link Wheels; It's all nonsense. But what is the harm in creating good quality pages on Web 2.0 sites such as Hubpages? Creating good quality, very useful content populated with videos and images - and pointing a link back to your site - how can that be considered spammy or black-hat?

It doesn't. The whole reason why I left a message in the first place is because everyone here is saying how these tactice should not be employed when I'm sure the majority do use some forms of those tactics.

TopSEOs has been written about many times over the past few years. This past summer several of us wrote articles, and I did a multi-article expose' on their tactics, methods and deceptive practices. Their response was to issue a public apology to the SEO community, make several major changes to their deceptive process, then proceed to act like they resolved everything, when, in fact, they continue, to this day, to push crappy companies to the top of their lists based on those companies paying for the position.

They do now happen to seed within those crappy listings, add legitimate companies, however at not time should anyone ever become enamored with the phony "ratings" they offer.

I would sincerely suggest that you understand that no truly reputable company would ever offer the types of services you seem to think "reputable" companies offer. And take heed at this article's list of tactics - because they are truly things to avoid, and actual reputable companies understand this.

Also I hit thumbs up due to the fact their are probably 3 points which I am a bit iffy with the other 30 ish are all decent reccomendations. Also becuase you are pretty cute Lindsey and we need more girls in SEO haha we dont want to scare them away by disliking their posts =)

Your comment is 10x more degrading than a thumb-down would ever be. You're telling an associate of a company that ranks on the first page for "seo" that you're sympathizing with her just because "she's a cute girl", and you don't want to "scare her away."

I don't agree with this article for the most part, but Lindsay is a prominent individual in the industry, and she's created some badass content (Check her Robots.txt article). She deserves much more respect than what you've displayed.

As someone who's heard similar, no, this isn't a compliment in the slightest. I know you meant it nicely, but Joe is right - it's degrading to be judged positively or negatively based on your looks, whether those looks are perceived as good or bad, when the original piece of work had nothing to do with gender or appearance.

Wow sorry if I meant any harm by my post, I was just trying to bring something nice into this post.

I understand it was probably not the correct thing to say.

I just feel we need more girls in this field and every one was been quite hurtful with their comments/ mass number of thubs down, if other girls read it they will think wow SEO is a male dominated field.

This is the methodology I was getting at, I was not trying to be sexist at all.

The majority of women you find in this field, or those who'd cut it in this field, are not the sort of weak little girls who'd let a controversial blog post make them stay away from or leave the industry.

That alone is a sexist mindset: that women need to see nice comments because they can't take all this negativity. Um, what? I'm one of the more thin-skinned people you'll meet in SEO, and this still absolutely blows my mind.

Sorry to hijack the comments, but it's really poor taste to suggest that because Lindsay's female, she needs some nice comments to make herself feel better.

Ha. Salvyy you apparently read NOTHING of the comment thread that led up to the comment you felt overwhelmingly compelled to chime in on. If you had, you would most definitely not have said what you said, let alone used "girl" as the choice of defining word you did.

Unless of course, you're an arrogant butthead. Which you may very well be. Though that would be assuming. So I'll give you a very tiny little slim to none benefit of the doubt there.

Me arrogant? :-) I don't think so. At least not as much as you :-) I read the comment post and it is obscene that so many females (are you happy now?) and some odd-thinking guys got so angry because of a simple comment. We all know that the author of this post is a great SEO. She also happens to be pleasant to one guy who complimented her for her looks. What's wrong with that? It's a strange world we're living in.

I appreciate where you're coming from, but I feel that many of us would just rather our looks not be brought up in areas like this, where they don't matter. This sort of thing happens relatively often to many of us, and isn't always positive. I know you probably don't see it that often, but being told about whether you're attractive or not is fairly commonplace and can get tiresome. I don't want my looks to matter here, and I would bet Lindsay would rather her posts be read without that being considered as well.

I can't speak for everyone, but for me personally, I'd just rather not be reminded or informed about whether someone finds me attractive or not in an environment like an SEO blog.

I don't know maybe because gfiorelli1 posts a CRAZY amount comments in every thread so maybe that is why SEO MOZ looks like a male dominated field...I guess he feels the need to reply to every ones comment...But I guess that is his style....

I was meerly making a point to the site, I think we need more girls in SEO, that been my opinion!!....I thought people were been a lil harsh with their comments hence why I was trying to be nice, trying to lighten up then spirits....Yes I understand what I posted was not the correct thing to say but I don't like how people over analyze things. Sorry for the 1 millionth time Guys and girls...

Here's my recommendation, quit while you're "ahead." Trying to divert your comment that was completely uncalled for by trying to make gfiorelli look like he's doing something wrong by being an active member on this blog, is not the way to make friends and influence people. First you offend every female SEO on the planet, then go after another community member... not cool in my book.

OMG. I refrained from chiming in on this sub-thread til now for a couple reasons. First, the women of SEO are more than sufficiently capable of standing up to this kind of stuff, don't need me or any other man to come to their aid. Second, I'm human, and far from perfect. Mostly a wise-guy in fact within our peer community. And happen to banter back and forth with some of my women friends in ways that would not otherwise be acceptable. We do so knowing that it's a mutually agreed upon thing, all in fun.

Yet because of that, I didn't want to chime in here only to have you or anyone else then just go and take something I have said in those situations, pull it out of context and get all indignant.

Having said all that, I need to say that you are one of the most myopic people I've ever had the displeasure to observe as far as blind cluelessness when it comes to one of the most important issues on this planet.

One thing I need to point out is this - WTH is it that causes you to even refer to the women in our industry as "girls"? You do it over and over. Not once have I read anything in this thread where you referred to women as "women". Do you even realize that by using that word, you immediately and instantly reveal yourself as a sexist bigot?

Seriously. They're NOT children. They're adults.

And have you also noticed a pattern here? Where you feel "ganged up on"? Because I don't think you have any willingness so far to look within. That pattern alone is a massive red flag. It's also a gift. For you to stop typing in defense of your mis-guided belief. And to ask yourself some serious fundamental questions about how you see women, not just in our industry.

Look, I get that you girls got offended - I understand perfectly, but can we please drop this now? It's not relevant to the discussion - and I don't see why other non-related people need to weigh in with something that's not adding to the topic - flooding my inbox with drivel that I don't really want to read.

Like I said I am sorry for the post, I understand I should have written women in the first place I was merely trying to post something nice.

I understand I made a mistake with the post, I am sorry if I offended any one I am sorry. And I was meerly stating Gifolli posts alot and that is his style I was not trying to target him, he posts some great content.